Zoho Corporation, a global technology company renowned for its comprehensive suite of business software has today announced a significant collaboration that is shaping up to change the future of AI in business applications. Zoho has revealed its plans to leverage another tech giant NVIDIA, by building and deploying large language models (LLM’s) tailored specifically to enterprise use with it’s AI accelerated computing platform, including NVIDIA NeMo.
This announcement is set to benefit over 700,000 customers globally across 150 countries, so this initiative will have wide scaling impact.
This is not the first foray into AI for Zoho, with Zoho providing updates at its 2024 Zoholics event in Austin Texas earlier this year, that over 5.5 billion AI hits through its products were happening each month.
That usage resonated with the team at Zoho undoubtedly which is why over the past year, Zoho has invested more than $14.9 million AUD in NVIDIA’s AI technology and GPU’s.
Ramprakash Ramamoorthy, Director of AI at Zoho Corporation, emphasised the company’s mission: “Many LLMs on the market today are designed for consumer use, offering limited value for businesses. At Zoho, our mission is to develop LLMs tailored specifically for a wide range of business use cases. Owning our entire tech stack, with products spanning various business functions, allows us to integrate the essential element that makes AI truly effective: context.”
If that first investment to NVIDIA was not enough, Zoho have committed to spending another $14.9 million AUD over the coming year, doubling their first investment.
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What stands out in Zoho’s approach is their commitment to privacy and contextual relevance. They prioritise user privacy from the outset, ensuring their models are compliant with privacy regulations from the ground up, rather than retrofitting them later. This is crucial in an era where data breaches and privacy concerns are at the forefront of technological discourse. Importantly, their LLMs will not be trained on customer data, reinforcing their dedication to safeguarding user information.
Zoho has been building its own AI technology for over a decade, integrating it contextually across its wide portfolio of over 100 products. Their multi-modal approach to AI is geared towards deriving contextual intelligence that can aid users in making informed business decisions.
They’re focusing on building narrow, small, and medium language models, which provides options for using different size models to deliver better results across a variety of use cases. This strategy means that even businesses without a large amount of data can still benefit from AI.
I have personally seen the challenges businesses face when adopting AI solutions that are not tailored to their specific needs. Generic models often lack the context needed to deliver meaningful insights in a business environment. Hallucinations become worse when businesses try to attack data too widely or without a real purpose and without any privacy safeguards. Zoho’s initiative to develop context-aware models could bridge this gap, offering businesses AI solutions that are both effective and compliant with privacy regulations.
Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, Asia South at NVIDIA, highlighted the significance of offering a range of AI model sizes: “The ability to choose from a range of AI model sizes empowers businesses to tailor their AI solutions precisely to their needs, balancing performance with cost-effectiveness. With NVIDIA’s AI software and accelerated computing platform, Zoho is building a broad range of models to help serve the diverse needs of its business customers.”
Through this collaboration, Zoho will be accelerating its LLMs on the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform with NVIDIA Hopper GPUs, using the NVIDIA NeMo end-to-end platform for developing custom generative AI—including LLMs, multimodal, vision, and speech AI. Additionally, Zoho is testing NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM to optimise its LLMs for deployment, already seeing a 60% increase in throughput and a 35% reduction in latency compared with a previously used open-source framework.
This development is more than just a technological upgrade; it’s a strategic move that underscores the growing importance of AI in business operations. As companies increasingly rely on AI to drive decision-making and efficiency, the need for models that are both powerful and contextually relevant becomes paramount. Zoho’s investment in NVIDIA’s platform not only positions them at the forefront of AI innovation but also sets a precedent for other companies to prioritise context and privacy in their AI initiatives.